Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Lottery Post uses Browserhawk (from Cyscape) to detect browser capabilities, so if a user's web browser does not meet the minimum standards required by the site, they can be shown a detailed message page, with a description of exactly what is under-functional.

When the new Google Chrome Web browser was released in the past week, Browserhawk did not detect the new browser properly (and still does not), so users of the new browser had problems logging in to the site.

Since Chrome uses the Apple WebKit open source codebase as its foundation, Browserhawk mistakenly detected the browser as Safari 1.0.

To remedy the situation — at least until Cyscape updates their browser definitions — I have re-programmed the main browser definition file to detect the Chrome browser as Safari 3.1. (Under the covers the Chrome rendering engine is Safari 3.1.)

For anyone else who uses Browserhawk for browser detection, adding Chrome to the browser definitions is fairly straight-forward:

Open the Browserhawk Editor.

Select File, Open..., and then select maindefs.bdf and click Open.

Right-click on the Safari folder (in the left folder/browser list), and click Add... in the context menu.

Technical articles and insight centered mainly on Microsoft development (ASP.NET, VB, C#, SQL Server). Written by the creator and architect of Lottery Post, the Internet's largest online lottery community.